With the U.S. border open the way it is, on all sides, it seems to not be a matter of ‘if’ but ‘when’. When good people do nothing, there is a price to be paid.

Schwartz, a national security analyst at the Department of Defense, paints a picture of mayhem in the aftermath of such an explosion. “On an otherwise calm and uneventful morning, a small nuclear weapon explodes in downtown Washington, DC.… The casualty count rises to over a hundred thousand, and the destruction is measured in hundreds of billions of dollars.”

Discussing the history of the nuclear age, Schwartz seeks to educate the reader about the fact that the development of nuclear weapons is not cutting-edge science, nor is it nearly as complicated as commonly assumed. As he puts it, “Iran is a large and wealthy country; Iranian scientists are capable; and the atomic bomb is 1940s technology.” Nuclear proliferation is an inevitability we simply have to admit: “The greatest danger remains the great discovery—the knowledge that can’t be unlearned.”

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Discussing the complexity of post-nuclear event forensic investigations, Schwartz warns that policymakers could very possibly struggle to ascribe responsibility for an attack. Diplomatic crises, he says, would almost certainly follow. Would, for example, China and Russia support U.S. policies in the aftermath of an attack, or seize the opportunity to push the international order in a direction that better suits them? Would smaller nuclear states not involved in the attack be willing to accede to aggressive American security demands? Schwartz convincingly argues that much post-attack support for the United States would likely be less-than-tangible.

While Right of Boom points out that a nuclear attack upon an major city would change America forever, Schwartz also makes clear that retaliation would be far from Hollywood simple. How many presidents—especially when faced with convoluted intelligence—would authorize nuclear retaliation against a foreign city, packed with civilians?